Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

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Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation - from his past, his parents, his culture - and so describes the high price of "making it" in middle-class America. Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.

Reviews

Arresting ... Splendidly written intellectual autobiography.Boston Globe

Superb autobiographical essay ... Mr. Rodriguez offers himself as an example of the long labor of change: its costs, about which he is movingly frank, its loneliness, but also its triumph.New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

Richard Rodriguezhas authored a "trilogy" on American public life and his private life-Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation,andBrown-concerned, respectively, with class, ethnicity, and race in America.He has also worked as a journalist on television and in print.Most recently he wroteDarling,a meditation on the Abrahamicreligions after 9/11.